GIGABYTE Begins Offering Intel Skylake Purley Architecture Products

GIGABYTE is now rolling out the first wave of products based on Intel’s Skylake Purley architecture for enterprise. In 2015, details of Intel’s future enterprise business codename “Purley” first surfaced online. This Purley architecture, according to Intel, represents the biggest platform advancement since Nehalem. It unifies the 2S, 4S and 8S+ socket platforms into a common socket-P. Purley also features a new interconnect technology called Omni-Path. Actually, eTeknix was at Computex 2016 last year to witness a preview of GIGABYTE’s Next generation 2U Purley barebone racks. Arguably, there are a lot that can happen in a year so the new Purley architecture products look slightly different and upgraded.

GIGABYTE Purley Architecture Product Offerings

GIGABYTE has eight new product offerings in 2U form factors for the new Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family. The flagship is the R281-NO0 rack which measures 982 x 588 x 268mm. Moreover, it weighs 20kg each.

To keep things running smoothly and in working thermal order, four 80x80x38mm fans running at 14,900 RPM are installed. Each rack has a pair of 9MR91FS0NR-00 motherboards, which supports dual LGA3647 CPUs, as well as 6-channel RDIMM/LRDIMM DDR4 for a total of 24 DIMMs. Up to 32GB RDIMM modules are supported, or 64GB LRDIMM modules.

It also has dual Intel I350-AM2 1Gb/s LAN, and one dedicated management port. In terms of expansion slots, the rack has six PCIe Gen3 slots. Moreover, there are also two OCP Gen3 x16 mezzanine slots available. Dual 1600W 80 PLUS Platinum PSUs are used for redundancy to power the entire system.

When it comes to storage, there are 24 2.5″ U.2 hot-swappable trays for HDD or SSDs. There are two additional 2.5″ SATA/SAS hot-swappable bays at the back as well. However, an SAS card is required to enable SAS device support.

System Management:

• Aspeed^® AST2500 management controller
• Avocent^® MergePoint IPMI 2.0 web interface:
  • Network settings
  • Network security settings
  • Hardware information
  • Users control
  • Services settings
  • IPMI settings
  • Sessions control
  • LDAP settings
  • Power control
  • Fan profiles
  • Voltages, fans and temperatures monitoring
  • System event log
  • Events management (platform events, trap settings, email settings)
  • Serial Over LAN
  • vKVM & vMedia (HTML5)

Operating system support:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 (x64) Update1
• Windows Server 2016
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 (x64)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 (x64)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.4 (x64)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.2 (x64)
• Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (x64)
• VMware ESXi 6.5

For more information about the rest of GIGABYTE’s Intel Xeon Scalable product family, visit: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/Rack-Server/Intel-Xeon-Scalable